The legalization of world politics is often celebrated for reducing impunity for those who contribute to humanitarian crises. This may sometimes be true but the opposite is also true. In 2010, United Nations peacekeepers unwittingly brought cholera to Haiti and sparked an epidemic. Nearly a million people were made sick and 8,500 died. Legal activists have sought to hold the UN responsible for the harms it caused and win compensation for the cholera victims. However, these efforts have been stymied by the structures of public international law—particularly UN immunity—which effectively insulate the organization from accountability. In short, the UN is empowered, and the cholera victims disempowered, by legalization. The Haiti case powerfully illustrates the dangers of legalism, which have been largely overlooked in discussions of international law, and suggests that law alone is an inadequate arbiter of responsibility in international politics.

A burgeoning literature in IR asserts there is a relationship between pop cultural artifacts and global policy processes, but this relationship is rarely explored using observational data. To fill this gap, I provide an evidence-based exploration of the relationship between science-fiction narratives and global public policy in an important emerging political arena: norm-building efforts around the prohibition of fully autonomous weapons. Drawing on in-depth interviews with advocacy elites, and participant-observation at key campaign events, I explore and expand on constitutive theories about the impact of science fiction on “real-world” politics.

A few years into the most recent wave of popular uprisings—the Arab Spring—studying regime trajectories in countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Yemen still seems like shooting at a moving target. Yet what has not escaped notice is the central role military actors have played during these uprisings. We describe how soldiers have three options when ordered to suppress mass unrest. They may exit the regime by remaining in the barracks or going into exile, resist by fighting for the challenger or initiating a coup d’état, or remain loyal and use force to defend the regime. We argue that existing accounts of civil-military relations are ill equipped to explain the diverse patterns in exit, resistance, and loyalty during unrest because they often ignore the effects of military hierarchy. Disaggregating the military and parsing the interests and constraints of different agents in that apparatus is crucial for explaining military cohesion during such crises. Drawing on extensive fieldwork we apply our principal-agent framework to explain varying degrees and types of military cohesion in three Arab Spring cases: Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Studying military hierarchy elucidates decision-making within authoritarian regimes amid mass mobilization and allows us to better explain regime re-stabilization, civil war onset, or swift regime change in the wake of domestic unrest.

Scholarship on Syria has traditionally been limited by researchers’ difficulty in accessing the reflections of ordinary citizens due to their reluctance to speak about politics. The 2011 revolt opened exciting opportunities by producing an outpouring of new forms of self-expression, as well as encouraging millions to tell their stories for the first time. I explore what we can learn from greater attention to such data, based on thick descriptive analysis of original interviews with 200 Syrian refugees. I find that individuals’ narratives coalesce into a collective narrative emphasizing shifts in political fear. Before the uprising, fear was a pillar of the state’s coercive authority. Popular demonstrations generated a new experience of fear as a personal barrier to be surmounted. As rebellion militarized into war, fear became a semi-normalized way of life. Finally, protracted violence has produced nebulous fears of an uncertain future. Study of these testimonials aids understanding of Syria and other cases of destabilized authoritarianism by elucidating lived experiences obscured during a repressive past, providing a fresh window into the construction and evolution of national identity, and demonstrating how the act of narration is an exercise in meaning making within a revolution and itself a revolutionary practice.

Political science should play a larger role in grappling with the political roots, meanings, and implications of the various levels and unique configurations of class inequality and racial diversity that have characterized the last several decades of U.S. history. I offer some observations about the discipline’s research, or lack thereof, and indicate suggestions about how we might think about and do more in these respects. I will come at these concerns by noting some developments that influenced the present in social and political terms and other events in political science; identifying intellectual guideposts that may help how we think about research issues of our day; considering why race and class are not studied (more); acknowledging how the questions have been studied, as well as noting some reservations about these; and providing several examples from the research in which I have been involved, both directly and indirectly, that suggest how we might or can study these questions.

Syria; February 2, 2014: Demonstration against the Syrian regime in the Bustan al-Qasr neighborhood in the city of Aleppo. (Photo Credit: Jalal Almamo)

In January 2011, a revolutionary chain of uprisings shook the Middle East and reverberated across the rest of the world. Five years later, the results of the so-called Arab Spring have been uneven. While authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Tunisia and Egypt, the latter has reverted to a military dictatorship. In Libya, and especially Syria, protests morphed into brutal civil wars. And in Yemen, the regime was able to successfully remain in power. Today the optimism that accompanied the Arab Spring has given way to a pessimism about its long-term effects. Yet the Arab Spring has also raised important questions about political phenomena such as the internal dynamics and resilience of authoritarian regimes, of the spread of protest movements, and on the relationship between the military and civil government. To allow for further reflection on these events, the Perspectives on Politics editorial staff has gathered a number of research articles, symposia, and reflections published in our pages over this time, and which have been ungated with complimentary access by Cambridge University Press. We hope that these pieces will help continue the discussion and provide further insights on the significance of the uprisings.

The finding that the preferences of middle-income Americans are ignored when they diverge from the preferences of the rich is one of the most widely accepted and influential conclusions in political science research today. I offer a cautionary note regarding this conclusion. I demonstrate that even on those issues for which the preferences of the wealthy and those in the middle diverge, policy ends up about where we would expect if policymakers represented the middle class and ignored the affluent. This result emerges because even when middle- and high-income groups express different levels of support for a policy (i.e., a preference gap exists), the policies that receive the most (least) support among the middle typically receive the most (least) support among the affluent (i.e., relative policy support is often equivalent). As a result, the opportunity of unequal representation of the “average citizen” is much less than previously thought. The analysis also shows, however, that substantial opportunity exists for unequal representation of strong partisan preferences. Together, these results reinforce the importance of party identification for understanding policy outcomes and who gets represented. [Read more.]

Intimate ethnography presents a number of challenges: How could I write about my own family in a way that was true to their experience but also an “objective” report? How could I convey telling details without robbing my family of their privacy? How could I rein in my emotions to report their story, and did I pick and choose facts to protect them or to make them more sympathetic? How could I generalize from their experience to that of millions of social assistance recipients? In this Reflections essay, I consider these challenges in light of what other social scientists have said about the issues of close work with individual, sometimes vulnerable, research subjects. [Read more.]